AI PCs flood the market. Their makers hope someone wants them Warehouses in the IT channel are stocking up with AI-capable PCs - industry watcher Canalys claims these made up 20 percent of all shipments during Q3 2024, amounting to some 13.3 million units worldwide. "Shipments," of course, simply means that these devices have left the makers' factory and been delivered to distributors, …
Generative AI is no more than a bullshit generator. It produces text or images or sounds that are almost indistinguishable from actual text/images/sounds but that are "imaginary" and only match "truth" or "reality" to some unknown extent.
Pattern-matching AI, used for complex image or data analysis, is potentially useful, so long as the AI model has been trained well enough. Even then, the output should be treated with care.
Who wants an "AI PC"? I see a Big Bubble that is going to burst sooner rather than later!
An NPU provides no battery life advantages if it is never used, and just uses up die area. The sooner needs to come sooner than it currently is to minimise the waste of resources and energy being shovelled by those investing in the current FOMO rush.
Was my first thought too. Microsoft still trying to railroad me to speak to their enterprise Copilot programme. They're not going to use this to leverage a platform refresh or nail home a costly extra license from me. I get the sense internally at these places it's all a bit Emperor's New Clothes.
"It smacks of 3DTV all over again."
Not true. 3DTV, if done right, is actually quite neat and entertaining. (The key is if it is done right, which often it wasn't on movies or home TV's.) AI PC's on the other hand have none of those advantages even if done right.
I want an AU PC as much as I want a 3D TV.
I don't want either.
A good friend of mine was temporarily taking charge of an independent electronics retail shop a few years ago. They’re not very technical but an excellent people manager and sales coach. They invited me down to the shop and asked my opinion on new technology in TV’s. Specifically should they invest in a 3D telly and a curved tv as display models? I said these were gimicks that would become old very quickly and I would bet them £100 that within two years they were not being pushed by the manufacturers on new models. Who suggested they had such things in the showroom? Well a rep apparently had come and paid a visit, these were top of his features they should have on display. After a nice thank you pub dinner with a few pints that I didn’t pay for, the question he’s been dying to ask finally comes up.
What’s wrong about curved tv’s he says, “they look really cool and I’d have one”
My concern is that it would restrict the viewing angle and give a sweetspot to a limited number of people on the sofa?
Apparently that had never occurred to him and another pint followed.
I’m with you, I don’t want AI on anything I own.
Everything to do with AI is just to generate sales.
Almost all the consumer use cases aren't even "AI", they are just rules and pushing ever more in terms of requests and searches into the cloud so that yet more data can be grabbed.
AI is just a total data grab, get as much of possible of absolutely anything before the regulators wake up.
The sad part is that this was always going to happen and with any data grab, once Big Tech has it, then that is it. You are not going to get it deleted redacted or anything.
Big Tech simply believe they are above any legal or moral code.
An AI PC is a PC with a small plastic "AI Ready" sticker on the front panel. It sells for a 22% premium over the "legacy" model with the same motherboard, CPU, memory, and storage devices. As ifxit will report, it differs from the legacy version only in the color plastic used for the external ports and the presence of a 58 pin connector connected to a 57 wire internal cable which is not actually connected to anything on the proximal end. The cable says "reserved for future use."
Given we are talking about desktops and laptops with typically a 3~4 year finance driven refresh cycle. Don’t see much need for future proofing, by the time the future arrives those systems purchased today will be heading toward the end of their normal business life.
What will the average PC user get out of their CPU's manufacturer allocating silicon to an NPU as opposed to any other alternative?
It seems like there's been a lot more hype around AI-enabled or AI-accelerated CPUs than there have been suggestions for what they might actually be used for. Cart, horse etc.
Id say the AI PC hype is more akin to the marketing hype around 5G when it was first launched, and the telcos really were struggling to come up with reasons why people needed it. Coming up with silly demos such as being able to run an air traffic control centre from someones living room. Great real world example there EE!
I still don't have 5G all these years later and im not feeling like im missing out on anything that can only be done on a 5G network, and i recon for the foreseeable future it will be the same with AI PCs.
I enjoy playing with LLMs. When I remember. I just can't figure out a reason why I'd want to use one. I don't create publicity materials or illustrations and the knowledge it dispenses is just a rehash of Wikipedia or similar. I figure that outside of specialist areas where their pattern recognition could be really useful (protein identification and synthesis, for example) they primarily appeal to marketing types. The sort of people who think 'technology' is applying a finger to a crowded screen of arcane symbols in order to move a control to make whatever is being marketed (or "is in the movie plot") happen.
Day to day I don't use knowledge like that. Its the same problem as I have with my Echo -- these are marvels of technology with unlimited potential but they all suffer from the Marvin Effect -- "Brain the size of a planet and all they ask me to do is open a door.....". I marvel at the sheer complexity of software involved in asking my friend Alexa to alter a thermostat -- the thermostat is just over there so I could just walk over and press a button -- but its far more spiffy to involve at least five computers of various sizes plus the entire friggin' Internet. (....and then you start thinking about potential points of failure and attack surfaces and start wondering something to the effect of "WTF?")
Eg replying to idiotic auditors who ask how do you ensure X when Y. Gen AI produces a wordy and superficially plausible policy that the auditor ticks.
The worry is that our sales droids are using it when replying to bids. Because sales droids hate customers about as much as they hate implementation teams and inversely to how much they love getting their on-target-bonus.
Now our clients are using AI to identify AI generated sales flummery. ourobos.
I've noticed people have started to use it for eBay listings too.
It's a wonderful way to ensure the specs in the description don't match the photos, but will tell me that a scruffy 10 year old HP Elitebook is "the perfect stylish companion for home, office and travel."
that the BBC et al are already using Copilot+ or some other AI fakery to write their headline stories. What gives it away ? The current rash of miss spellings and trend for split infinitives, which the general mass of readers don't even notice. Then there's the great headline without any actual story to match, but there's quite lengthy text output apparently gleaned from people living nearby who heard something, or fear something now they have watched the 7 second output from someone else's home security CCTV or a body worn cameras.........
Ah well, seeing as most people feel they are not that clever and normally feel they need to rely on some form of professionals opinion rather than their own innate gut feelings, the AI push will more than likely raise enough money for the industry to complete it's next generative marketing advances in technology products.
AI fridge anyone ? AI route planner ? AI holiday destination organiser ? AI birthday present purchaser ?
SHEESH
ALF
When people see how useless AI is, people will work to find out how to remove such rubbish from their computers. Security will somehow be a concern.
When I retire in 14 months, my home PC will no longer need to run Windows and will be upgraded to Linux. I am not aware of anyone planning to infect it with AI.
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